Memories of Home: An Emotional Landscape for Elderly Care

Abstract

Institutional healthcare models are failing Canada’s elderly. A long culture of agism has led to the creation of sterile, visually dominant, and commodified architectural environments that lack the emotional and social supports needed during an inherently vulnerable time of life. Through architectural memory, emotion, and sensory experience, a people-focused approach to elderly care engages a person’s sense of self, belonging, and place. Intergenerational programming for the elderly, the surrounding community, and caregivers, intertwines creative care concepts with health and housing. Place, path, pattern, edge, and emotive materials are parameters that transform the intangible qualities of human life into a physical configuration of spatial emotion. Wallace, Nova Scotia, was used as a testing site to explore the various scales of place using the working methods of continuous line drawings, imagined narratives, and memory mapping to identify and cultivate a habitus of place for the elderly to live.